Field of the Invention
The invention generally relates to an electronic device, a processor, and a method for setting a sensor, and more particularly, to method performed by calculating a plurality of groups of candidate sensor settings.
Description of the Related Art
Recently, many electronic devices may be equipped with photographic devices, such as a digital camera, wherein the electronic devices may be mobile telephones, personal digital assistants, portable music and video players, and portable computer systems such as laptops, notebooks, tablet computers, and so on. It is therefore important that the digital cameras in electronic devices be able to produce the most visually appealing images in a wide variety of lighting and scene situations with limited or no interaction from the user, as well as in a computationally and cost-effective manner.
One feature that has been implemented in some digital cameras to create visually appealing images is known as “auto exposure.” Auto exposure (AE) can be defined as any operation that automatically calculates and/or manipulates certain camera exposure parameters, e.g., exposure time, gain, or f-number, in such a way that the currently exposed scene is captured in a desirable manner.
However for conventional AE technology, in one calculation cycle, only one group of sensor settings is generated for a plurality of frames (e.g. 3 frames or more) of the calculation cycle. Therefore, when updating the sensor settings, the digital camera may expend at least three frames in adjusting the settings of the sensor, and so the reaction time of updating the sensor settings can be slow, and the fluency of the image will suffer. In addition, when the environmental brightness changes, the digital camera may not update the sensor setting until next calculation cycle.
Therefore, solving the problems described above would improve the slow reaction time and low fluency when setting a sensor, and therefore is a subject worthy of discussion.